Dr. David Deane offers a reminder that Advent is not a mere warm-up act before Christmas, but rather the Church’s annual rebellion against a world that has forgotten how to wait for Christ.

It's a message he delivered in the heart of Halifax, at St. Mary's Cathedral, on a Saturday evening at the start of the season.

Speaking to The Catholic Register, the associate professor of theology at the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax shared deep insight into the points he hoped to get across at the Dec. 6 retreat, that the paradoxical Advent season is more than just preparing for Christ’s birth 2,000 years ago, but an active preparation of our hearts for a real encounter with the living Christ now. 

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“It’s a curious time problem that we have,  the idea of waiting for something that in one sense has already happened,” he said. “ I'm drawing a distinction between ultimate reality, which is God and His relationship with the world, and linear time, which becomes more real when it participates in God's life.” 

Deane relates our own preparation for the encounter with Jesus Christ as the central story of all of creation and history, the same story Peter faced when asked, “Are you with the Gentile?" on Holy Thursday. 

“It remains the exact same for us now. This is the challenge of which world and which reality are we going to live in? The reality of the peace, joy and goodness that is Christ, or are we going to refuse that in the service of accepting the tyranny and the banality of the world,” he said. 

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The tyrannical secularism Deane alludes to has plagued Christians, notably during the seasons of Advent and Christmastide, far too long. Describing the commercial sentimentality and capitalist secularism that have grown over the last 500–600 years, he asserts that modern life’s prioritization of the measurable over ultimate reality has contributed to the fading attentiveness of Catholics amidst the season.   

“ Part of my argument is that everything else is a side, minor player — shopping, capitalism, food, money, lights, these are all lovely things, but they are harmful when they become a veil. Instead, time needs to be an icon to which we see reality, God in the poor, in the lowly, in creation, most perfectly in the Eucharist,” he said. 

Deane also provided practical ways to prepare for the coming of Christ into the world that reveal rather than veil God. These include fervent  prayer, fasting and almsgiving, where we as Catholics are invited to break through the commercial veils and begin to see reality, which is the real presence of God in the form of the lowly, the baby in the womb, the dispossessed, the least of us. 

The theologian likens the preparation during Advent to that of the Virgin Mary, recalling the line from the Catechism that “the Church is Marian before its Petrine.”  A remarkable and radical line, it reveals that at the Annunciation, our Blessed Mother says yes to the Holy Spirit, and the result of that is the real presence of Christ within her. 

“This is what the Church is: a yes to the Holy Spirit that leads to the real presence of Christ in men and women.  She's our model, our template of how we can become fully Marian in Advent as we accept Jesus Christ radically into our eyes in preparation for His birth,” he said. 

While admittedly a very perplexing shift in mentality, Deane is hopeful that attendees of the basilica’s retreat on Dec. 6 were able to come across with an invaluable renewed awareness of what is truly real and what isn’t during the Season of Advent. For him, the more Catholics who understand the profound waiting, as opposed to merely drifting through it, the better.

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“The truth is that we all are Peter, we're all in that room, we're all being asked, ‘Are you with the Nazarene?’ I want to show practical ways that our prayer, fasting and almsgiving can help break through the veil of time and enable us to see the reality of God through it,” he said. 

“Hopefully, people leave with a set of helpful spiritual practices that can shape their minds and their bodies to receive Christ and become one with Him during this key season of the year.”